


use the needle of your compass (to sew up your broken heart)

by dixiehellcat



Series: Tony Stark Bingo Round 4 [8]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers use their words, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), F/M, Gen, Love Is Not For Children, M/M, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:07:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28552098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dixiehellcat/pseuds/dixiehellcat
Summary: Natasha waits for Tony to recover from injuries, and thinks about the path they have journeyed together.Fills the "Tony Stark/Natasha Romanoff" square on my Round 4 Tony Stark Bingo card number 4028. (required info collected below)
Relationships: Background Pepper Potts/James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Background Steve Rogers/James "Bucky" Barnes, Natasha Romanov & Avengers Team, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Natasha Romanov/Tony Stark
Series: Tony Stark Bingo Round 4 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009245
Comments: 3
Kudos: 37
Collections: Tony Stark Bingo Mark IV





	use the needle of your compass (to sew up your broken heart)

**Author's Note:**

> Bingo specifics:  
> Card Number: 4028  
> Square Filled (Letter AND number AND prompt) A5, Tony/Nat  
> Ship/Main Pairing: Tony/Nat (background Pepper/Rhodey and Steve/Bucky)  
> Rating (Gen, Teen, Mature, Explicit) gen  
> Major Tags/Warnings/Triggers: Canon Divergence—post-Avengers, Avengers Use Their Words, Team as Family, Love Is Not For Children, Natasha Romanoff Is Not a Robot  
> Summary: Natasha waits for Tony to recover from injuries, and thinks about the path they have journeyed together.

“How’s he doing?” Pepper’s whisper was barely audible over the beeps and hisses of medical equipment.

Natasha looked up from the ancient home magazine in her hands. She had stared at the same page for some indeterminate amount of time without actually registering a word. “Resting,” she replied, a hint of a smile coming to her at the sight of her friend standing in the half-open door to the hospital room.

“How are _you_ doing?” Pepper slipped into the room, put a hand on Nat’s shoulder and looked toward the bed where Tony lay sleeping, festooned with bandages.

“I’m...doing,” Nat conceded and laid the useless reading material aside.

“It sounds awful to say, but I’m glad it’s you and not me.” Pep inclined her head toward Tony. “You’re good for him, Natalie.” That made Nat chuckle softly; the cover name that had almost embarrassed her in the aftermath of her SI infiltration had been adopted by Pepper as a good-natured jest and a sign of forgiveness. “You’re in the same game with him, so you understand what he’s feeling when he suits up and goes out there. I tried, but it just wasn’t something I could wrap my head around.”

“Not that you wound up much better,” Nat teased gently. “I mean, you ended up with a superhero anyway. Have you heard from Rhodes, by the way?”

“He’s flying back from Asia as we speak. I just thought I’d peep in on you both. Do you need anything?”

“No, I’m good, but thank you for asking.”

They spent a few minutes catching up, and Pepper left after exacting a promise Nat would let her know when Tony came around. The light kiss she planted on Tony’s forehead warmed Nat’s heart; the two of them reminded her so much of her and Clint, and she was glad for their love for each other.

Sitting alone again, the quiet broken only by the reassuringly steady peep of the heart monitor, Natasha found her mind going back, to the day she stood on the roof of Stark Tower with Loki’s staff in her hands, watching Iron Man fly out a hole in the sky with a bomb in his grasp, and feeling sickened in a way she never had before. She had remembered the things she had written about him in her report to SHIELD, and wondered how in hell she could have been so wrong about him, before she realized he had fooled her in the same way she had always fooled people. 

Steve had ordered the portal closed to protect earth, but hers was the hand that executed the action. Now she had the red of Tony Stark’s life ending on her hands, and would never be able to wipe it away. Something hissed to her that it could help her take all that away, and she located the voice coming from the scepter. She wanted to throw it away, wanted to scream and rage and absurdly even weep, but she needed it to lean on. Her knees had been uncharacteristically unsteady beneath her as she whispered _come on Stark_ , watching for him to come back, sure he wouldn’t. Then he did, and the relief was unlike anything she could remember feeling for another person, even Clint. 

Tony had invited all the Avengers to come back to the tower, been so excited as he explained how he had rebuilt it with special spaces for all of them. Natasha hadn’t quite believed it until she ‘dropped in’ one night and found him rattling around a huge kitchen on a vacant floor he explained he had designed as a common area. She had done something that night that she did so rarely she couldn’t recall the last time; she had apologized to him for her past actions, for spying on him, for misjudging him. He had laughed that light laugh she now knew was fake, and said, “Nothing to forgive, Romanoff, you were right.”

“Bullshit, Stark,” she had retorted. “Your masks are as good as mine.”

That had stopped him, and he eyed her with a change to his demeanor. “Takes one to know one?” he finally offered.

She shrugged, helped herself to his vodka, and they sat and talked half the night. “Hey, Spider Woman,” Tony reminded her when she put her glass down and finally stood to leave, “you have a place here, you know.”

“I thought you were kidding.”

Tony had looked so offended. “Some things I don’t kid about,” he said with a sniff, and led her to a suite big enough to hold half the Soviet Politburo. “If this doesn’t suit you, Princess Anastasia, let me know, and I’ll swap you the penthouse floor.”

“Aren't you and Pepper still…”

“Oh. No. She’s the greatest, she means the world to me and always will, which probably will mean I’ll never have another serious relationship, because who’s going to go into a thing with me knowing a part of me will always love my ex? But she put up with way too much of my shit as my PA for me to put her through more of it romantically. Besides, she sat down and got real with me, after the—the Chitauri mess. She’s got nerves of steel where business is concerned, but she just doesn’t think she could handle the all-new and wholly unique brand of crazy I took on when I became a superhero.”

Nat had almost said, that night, that he was wrong about never having someone in his life who could understand his feelings for Pepper. _Takes one to know one_ , she nearly said, and thought about the day they had first met in his workout room. She had flirted, the way she did on practically every assignment, and he had flirted back, but not the crass shallow way she had expected. Instead of vulgar comments about her looks, he had said she had a quiet reserve, and an old soul, and left her baffled and weirdly turned on. At his ill-fated birthday party, he had helped her fire repulsors, and she had very nearly blown her cover and gone full-on Black Widow with geeky weapon love. She had gotten into it, into him, as she never did on the job. She did not say any of that. “Thank you,” she had said instead. “This is lovely.”

The other Avengers found their way to the tower over time, temporarily or otherwise, and they became a team. Nat remembered persuading Steve, after the fall of SHIELD, that they had to take the information they had found about the Winter Soldier to Tony. It had not been easy, telling him who had killed his parents, and why, how Bucky Barnes had been broken and molded into HYDRA’s weapon. Steve had gone back to DC, after, but she had gone looking for Tony; he had been too quiet and unnaturally calm during their presentation. He had nobody, really, except Pepper and Rhodes, and they had just started dating, so did he have any humans who really gave a damn about him? 

Sure enough, she had found him roaring drunk in his workshop in the tower basement. He had yelled in anger—not at her or Steve, he hastened to assure her of that at one point, nor at Barnes because _fuck, Romanoff, I’ve been through torture, and I broke, I’m the last person on the planet to throw stones at anybody on that score._ He wasn’t even sure who he was mad at, other than HYDRA, obviously. Then, he had started to talk about his mother, and ended up in a heap on the workshop floor, his face twisting as though fighting back tears. 

Natasha was the Black Widow, and emotions were not her strong suit, but she had relearned them. Clint and his family, and now this odd little family the Avengers were becoming, had taught her those valuable lessons. She had sat down beside Tony on the cold concrete, put out her hand, and said, “For what it’s worth, I’m here.” He had wept like a child in her arms then, and somewhere along the way she found a tear or two sliding down her own cheek. “I’m glad at least you knew your parents,” she breathed at one point, “before they were taken from you.”

She did not mean for him to hear, but he did. “Sort of,” he had mumbled. “You didn’t--I guess I assumed…but then that just goes to prove what happens when you assume, huh?” 

“I don’t even know my birth father’s name,” she had said, then shook her head. “Never mind, this is about you, not me.”

“No,” he said (how was it even after knowing him for several years, he could still surprise her?). “You have the right to hurt. Don’t let what was beaten into you take that from you.”

“Takes one to know one?” she joked gently, and coaxed a twist of a smile from him in return. 

“This mean I should stop calling you Romanoff?”

“By now surely you can call me by something other than my last name, Tony,” she replied in an unwonted moment of honesty. 

“I could call you a lot of things.” His voice dropped, and Nat had taken it as his usual flirtatious mode reasserting itself; but there was something more serious about his dark eyes on hers, still wet with grief. It was still a shock when his lips brushed her cheek. “Not pushing anything,” he said softly. “Just, like you said, for what it’s worth, I’m here.”

The Avengers went after the remains of HYDRA full force. When the scepter they had taken from Loki was located in the villains’ hands, Natasha recalled the eerie voice she had resisted on the roof in New York, and warned her teammates about it. She got into the base in Sokovia where it was reportedly being hidden, right behind Tony. They found the thing, that Tony called the Glowstick of Destiny (why did he even give inanimate objects nicknames, she pondered). He was about to snag it when a motion caught Nat’s attention. She whirled and faced a young woman with crimson fire in her eyes, and blocked her before she could reach out for Tony. Nat's cry brought him around, but before he could even think about using the scepter as a weapon, something—maybe human, but moving far too quickly—swept past, caught the woman up, and escaped. “Nazis are still chickens, huh?” Tony yelled, then turned on Nat. “Did you really need to be throwing yourself alone at two of them?”

“There were only two for a fraction of a second,” she countered. “You were busy. You weren’t watching your butt, so somebody needed to.” She did not add that half of SHIELD, in its day, had watched his butt, to her knowledge, nor that she felt it was well worth watching, and more, had fantasized about some things she might enjoy doing to it. 

He smirked like he knew it all the same. “Aw, Charlotte, you care.” 

(She had had to look the significance of the name up the first time he called her that. The next time, she retorted, “Thanks, but I’m not likely to spin a web and lay several hundred eggs.” Tony did not need to know the little pang that making that light crack brought her; they weren’t serious, hadn’t been and weren’t likely to be, certainly not enough for her to confide events of her past that echoed through her now. They weren’t even sleeping together, not that that mattered to Natasha. She had used sex as a weapon so long that she frankly wondered if, in the unlikely event she ever got into a relationship, she would even feel the need for that.)

They still weren’t that serious, as of that day in the old castle in Sokovia, so Nat had quickly tried to regroup. “Fury would bury me in paperwork if I let you get yourself hurt,” she snarked, but Tony’s eyes narrowed in an all too knowing manner. 

“Same,” he said, suddenly sober. “We need you to stay safe, Widow…I need you to.”

“Don’t worry,” she had said, trying to be casual, “I’m not nearly as self-sacrificing as the spider in that book.”

On Nat’s insistence, Thor took the scepter immediately to Asgard. Tony and Bruce had pouted, but relented. Maria Hill had told them the people they encountered had been twins, subjects of HYDRA’s experiments, and the Avengers kept an eye out for them as they continued cleaning out the remains of the criminal organization. They didn’t cross paths again, but some time later, the purged and reformed SHIELD brought them in. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff were debriefed, and disabused of the lies their captors had told them. “Stark, you accused them of being Nazi sympathizers, and I’m not always a fan of your smart mouth,” Hill had said, “but apparently what you said stung. They did some research, to prove you wrong, but just proved you right; so they turned themselves in.”

The Maximoff twins, though they both gave Tony unexplained side-eyes regularly, ended up joining the Avengers, alongside Tony’s friend War Machine and Steve’s pal Falcon, and Tony revamped an old Stark facility into a bigger base for the team. It was a little sad, not having them all on top of each other in the tower, but they could use the help. In fact, Tony was spending much of his free time trying to trace a city hero calling himself Spider-Man. He regularly kidded Natasha, asking if she knew of any long-lost siblings of hers.

In the end, they didn’t find Bucky Barnes; he found them. Natasha accompanied Steve, Tony, and the twins to meet Steve’s old friend, and joined in the silent shock when they found out he was much more than just an old friend. The passionate kiss the two super-soldiers fell into was a fairly obvious hint. There wasn’t much time for a reunion, though; Bucky led them to a HYDRA base in Siberia, where he said failed super-soldiers were being held on ice. “Old home week,” Tony ribbed Nat gently.

“I hate Siberia,” she growled. “I might as well blame you for Alaska, just because America.”

They found the base, a cache of weapons, and cryo-tubes holding flawed Winter Soldiers—who the surviving HYDRA operators promptly turned on the raiding party. The Avengers old and new fought well side by side, but the manic super-operatives just kept coming. Natasha refused to yield, but felt despair when two scientists whipped out some type of ray with a beam that glowed like the scepter, turned it on Wanda, and somehow took control of her. She screamed defiance, but could not resist as they used her like their own magic-powered puppet. Every Avenger dove for cover as she fired her scarlet energy bolts at them: every one, except Pietro, who was already down with an injury to his leg. Bucky slid along the floor, trying to reach Quicksilver and pull him to safety, but the HYDRA goons spotted him, and took full and cruel advantage of the situation. They rotated Wanda, gasping and crying out and fighting them with everything in her, and lined her up, slowly, to fire on her own brother. Natasha didn’t want to shoot her, even with just a widow’s bite, but they had to do something.

A flash of red and gold solved the problem: Tony, lunging between the Scarlet Witch and her targets, trusting his suit would protect him. It did…sort of; the strike was not mortal, but Iron Man went down heavily, with an ugly burning slash across his chest. The sight sent Wanda into even more panic, and paradoxically, she seemed to draw new strength, and resisted the beam’s grasp just long enough for Steve to get a line of sight, hurl his shield, and take down both weaponeers. The Avengers had blown up the base and fled, rushing Tony to medical help.

Which brought Natasha back to the present, and the bed she sat beside, and the man lying in it who just then began to stir. His ridiculous eyelashes fluttered, before his eyelids rose and his hazy gaze focused on her. “Be still,” she ordered when he smiled a loopy little smile and tried to reach toward her. “Helen put you under to assess the damage and patch you up. The arc reactor didn’t take any damage. You’re going to be fine.”

He grunted and smacked his lips a little. “How’re Fast and Weird?” he croaked.

“Pietro’s leg was just a flesh wound, it’s stitched and he’s resting it. Wanda’s upset, very, but the last time I saw them, Steve was calling Clint to talk to her.”

“Hmph, good, he can practice his parenting skills on ‘em.”

Now that Tony was awake, and uncomfortable but all right, Nat allowed herself to feel a wave of anger. “You’re not supposed to pull this noble altruistic self-sacrificing bullshit,” she told him.

“Oh yeah,” he mumbled, “that’s right, not my thing...textbook narcissism, compulsive tendencies, yada yada...”

The words that her stupid past self wrote felt like a knife to her heart. “I need you,” she said before she could stop herself. 

Tony squinted up at her, his focus still bleary from pain and blood loss and anesthesia. “Well, I do try to be of as much use as a consultant can be to the—”

Nat cut him short. “You aren’t listening to me. _I need you_.” She touched her chest as she spoke, but hesitated to touch his, all wrapped and stitched, so instead she booped his nose lightly with her finger.

He actually let out a drugged-up giggle. “You did that at my birthday party, remember? Still cute, even wearing gear that could’ve blown me out the back wall of my old house.”

“I had feelings for you even back then,” she found herself admitting. 

“Feelings, like, in your pants?”

“There too.”

“Wow.” Nat took a moment of pride in having rendered him speechless. “You win, Black Widow, your mask’s the best. I had no idea.”

“Masks,” she said with a dismissive flick of her hand. “Useful, but I’ve found they are so tiring. You need to take them off sometimes.”

Ever disobedient, Tony raised one hand to brush across her cheek. “Not so good for your complexion either.”

She grinned, recognizing the way he used his wicked humor to sort out situations. “How considerate of you to notice.”

“Shame to mess that up,” he nodded, as his hand slid down to her neck and curled gently around the back to tug her down. The kiss was a little sloppy, a little awkwardly positioned, but warm, and true.

Natasha wasn’t sure if she could ever say the word ‘love’, but she felt fairly certain that was what this was. She had known, when she told Loki with a straight face that love was for children, she had been lying through her teeth. She loved Clint, she had come to love this family she had found in the Avengers, and now, what she finally allowed herself to acknowledge she felt for Tony, not better or worse, just different—if this was love, this fierce drive to guard him, and hold him, and watch him soar, all wound up in each other—it was something that it took an adult to steer.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a VERY different AU! Nat makes Steve tell Tony about his parents and Bucky after the end of WS, so that’s out of the way, and Tony’s reaction helps Steve to trust him. Her brush with the scepter lets her warn them later to get rid of it before the science bros can start to mess with it, and her being with Tony when he goes after it lets her block Wanda from triggering his nightmare vision that drives him to make Ultron, so all the AoU mess never happens. Since that never happens, Pietro doesn’t die, the global uproar for the Accords never happens, and the Avengers stay united; and with no disaster in Sokovia, Zemo never comes gunning for them, so it's holed-up remnants of Hydra who are guarding the flawed super-soldier experiments, which Bucky knows about but has been unable to go after himself—they’re too strong for him alone. So Avengers still end up in Siberia, but not the same members or for the same reasons or with the same reactions. 
> 
> On more personal levels, since Tony and Pepper break up shortly after Avengers, he doesn’t feel the same drive to obsess over building suits to protect her, he stays in NY, so IM3 doesn’t happen, and he still has the arc reactor as of this story’s time, the end of CW. And most importantly for purposes of this story, Natasha is, after years of holding back her building feelings for Tony, about ready to let those out. (as for what might happen next, I do not know. Tony nicknaming Nat after the loving spider in Charlotte's Web, who sacrifices herself for her family, is highly ironic whether the endgame of Thanos occurs as canon or not. I tend to think not, but that's just me.)


End file.
